Congratulations to palakaboy who has won July's Assignment with a decisive 13% of the total votes. In second place is Q u e n t i n with 6%, followed by WestCoast, daisy, Nelepl and thestig2010 who all came joint third with 4% of the votes each. As always, congratulations to everyone who entered, especially our first-timers.

As always, this means the winner, palakaboy, has until the end of August to suggest a theme for September's assignment, along with any rules. You have until 31 August to do so, although sooner is always better so we can start thinking! As always, please let us know what the theme is in July's Q&A thread.

The theme for this month is "extremes", as suggested by Laurel who won the May 2009 competition. Be sure to read this whole message for the rules.

In Laurel's own words:

"Since July is one of the hottest months for us in the northern hemisphere, something that comes to mind is 'extremes'. As for post processing, anything goes!"

The rules!

1: You can only submit one image and it has to be taken during July 2009. Photos taken earlier will be disqualified!

2: All images submitted must be no more than 500 pixels on their longest side, although you can include a link to a full resolution version if you like. Flickr users must link back to the original version to comply with its latest rules.

As always, please exercise good judgement on what is suitable for the forum. See the Forum Rules for guides.

Please include a sentence or two with your photo describing what you were trying to achieve and if there were any particular challenges in doing so like, for example, any special exposure or lighting setup.

We're all enthusiasts here, so it's also great to see what equipment you used and the settings too. So please also include the following:

Extreme streetlightThis was taken in Spain at night with my wide angle. I wanted the streetlight to look almost like a sun in the dark night.Canon EOS 40D
Sigma 10-20mm @ 10mm (16mm equivalent)
30Second exposure
F/4
ISO100
I brightened some shadows and added some contrast in Photoshop.
Original size (though compressed)

Meditating (stretching) before we had to start jogging. Taken around 7:09. So strange seeing a person so calm and then beings running frivolously for 2 hours. Sure proves people can be pushed to their extremes.

Apologies to Salvador Dali who must be spinning in his grave at this rip-off of his style!

Zero to infinity against the vault of the sky with the vastness of space beyond is about as far as I dare stretch this idea.

Multi-layer composition in Photoshop. Zero and Infinity symbols lifted from the internet, shadow effect created by duplicating the image, reducing intensity and adding Gaussian blur. Perspective effect by using Transform >> Distort. Confronted with a weird-shaped image I then added a further sky layer behind and reduced its density to project the frame forward.

The sun was setting and it's light was extreme! Too bright to even properly look through the viewfinder, and it resulted in some flare as well. Ended up with some pretty extreme shutter speeds as well, this one's only 1/5000th, but I took others at 1/8000th.

In the Mojave its gets upwards of 120F, on this day we hit 108F and in the afternoon the wind picked up and blew this storm over our heads however I had a key hole view of the sun setting under the storm clouds, there was a fair amount of dust in the air which added to the deep reds we see. You can also see some precipitation in the right side of the cloud formation, it was a moment of extremes for me. I only had a compact Digi on me but I thought it worthy to share with regards to the subject.

Having been in the heat all day with this change and I had quite a strong emotional reaction to Mother Nature and what she can bring, taken 01 July 2009.

Lit using a smith-victor hot light, ambient lighting- a very cooperative, patient model (it was 80 degrees, ridiculously humid, and there were ants crawling all over here)... one might say she was extremely patient and extremely cooperative